How Nike uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+

Sports are an inherently social activity, so brands like Nike are a natural fit when it comes to social media marketing.
To find out how the sports giant makes the most of this opportunity, I thought it would be interesting to see how it uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.
This post is the latest in a series of blogs that have taken a similar look at major brands including ASOS, Tesco, Red Bull, Cadbury and McDonalds…

Facebook

Like most global brands Nike has separate Facebook pages for each of its product categories. This includes golf, snowboarding and FuelBand, as well as two football pages – one for the American version of the sport and one for the version everyone else in the world plays.
As far as I can tell the latter actually has the most fans of any of the Nike pages (17.2m), followed by the main corporate account (12.3m) and American football (2.4m).
Most of the dedicated sports pages are updated on a daily basis with videos or images, while the corporate page is updated about once a week.

The social teams are obviously lucky in that they have a huge number of athletes around whom they can create and share content, so the global football page displays a huge amount of content featuring the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Andres Iniesta, as well as a lot of product-related posts.

At the moment much of the content is around Nike’s “Be Mercurial” campaign to promote its Mercurial Vapor IX boots, including video clips of personalised boots that customers have bought online through NIKEID.

Interestingly the product-related content appears to get more interactions than posts featuring players, with one photo gallery of new boots attracting more than 35,000 ‘likes’ and almost 1,000 comments.

Similarly, the American football page is updated several times per week with a focus on athletes and products.